after she found me a room of my own, she virtually demanded that before we go to Goldstein’s, I use the peculiar shower attachment in my bathroom, which she explained in tedious detail. I didn’t listen. I soaked the floor! –
I think it was the same neurosis about hygiene that made her insist on new underclothes even before we bought skirts and blouses. She kept saying ‘shush’ like some wretched governess when the brassieres made me hoot with laughter. They were called things like ‘Lilyette’ and ‘Bali’! To think modern women should wear contraptions that make their bosoms stick up like hay-stacks! – and some of them make them bigger with plastic, like that funny Mrs Jordan in the magazine! – and the knickers covered nothing, they were strings with lace. ‘I draw the line at buying these.’ ‘Then you’ll just have to wash out your own each night,’ she said rather strictly. (Why? are they mad with cleanliness, today’s humans?) So I asked if they had some not made of string, and chose some French knickers in pink satin. I think it was malice that made her ask for ‘large’. She herself is on the large side, but I am not.
New outer garments were more of a problem. There was really no necessity, my suit would be good for several more years. I did not want to be obliged to her, and of course she was using her own money until I had managed to get some of my own.
I resisted, but she insisted, so we ended up back in Bloomingdale’s.
And then my mood underwent a sea-change, for oh, the glory of Bloomingdale’s! One particular colour called to me; one particular part of the spectrum. I wanted to be warm again. I think I had been cold for such a long time. I wanted to be in summer, although of course this was still only spring. Anything from yellow through orange to pink. The sunshine colours. An Italian wall. A street of Spanish orange trees. Angelica’s cheek on a July afternoon. Apricot: marrying pink and gold. It called to me from a satin hanger. Golden blush on a warm pink silk that glowed in their white extravagant light. A shirt, long-sleeved, with curved reveres that had something dashing, something dry about it – I tried it on last of a pile of things, I was about to take it off and leave, but at the last second I turned up the collar in the mirror of the changing-room – and in that instant, looking back at me, boyish, over my shoulder was the ghost of a self I had been once, witty, wide-eyed, mischievous, young. I peered through the curtains and summoned Angela.
‘I want to keep this,’ I said, and laughed.
‘Why are you laughing?’ She sounded suspicious. ‘Did you choose the most expensive one?’
It wasn’t her fault. Though she had good points, she constantly showed a side that was – common. I don’t like to use that word, of course one’s egalitarian, but Angela was obsessed with money. Perhaps she could not sell her books. When I inquired, she got rather angry & claimed she was actually ‘a best-seller’. I was fifty before I started making money, so I tried to judge her less severely.
Today I will have money of my own! One does need money – I’ll try that again. We all need money and a room of our own – I must remember not to use the ‘one’, I have noticed it’s fallen out of fashion, as if no-one wants to be singular now. Everything is ‘we’ – they feel things in herds, the citizens of the twenty-first century.
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